Ties With Vatican Found Improved

The relationship between the U.S. Catholic hierarchy and the Vatican has significantly improved through a number of personal contacts during the past few years, beginning with the Pope’s visit in 1987, according to a Jesuit author of a recently published book on American archbishops.

Father Thomas J. Reese, a fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center in Washington and associate editor of America magazine, said the U.S. trip was very revealing for Pope John Paul II, who was led to expect a rude and cold reception.

“He had been told that he was going to meet people booing him, throwing tomatoes and rotten eggs and all this kind of thing. And what he found was cheering crowds, people who participated in liturgies prayerfully and an enthusiastic welcome. So, he began to learn that some of his advisers on the American scene were not giving him the straight story. And that had a tremendous effect on the Vatican’s view of the U.S. church,” said the priest during a recent interview.

In preparing his book, “Archbishop: Inside the Power Structure of the American Catholic Church,” the priest, a political scientist, visited all 31 archdioceses in the United States. He interviewed each archbishop and countless staff people who help govern the local churches.

Book Widely Hailed

What resulted is a detailed account of the structure by which the bishops govern the church in the United States. The book, widely hailed as a first-of-its-kind look at the job of archbishop and how it gets done, examines the procedures and rules through which the headline-making struggles of the past few years have taken place. The book also catalogues the enormous list of duties and decisions which have little to do with headlines but which dominate the days of most prelates.

In the world of administering the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, all the bucks seem to stop on the archbishop’s desk. To the daily running of the archdiocese are added responsibilities of governing the province and beyond, of being informed about, and sometimes involved in, issues of the international church. All of it is done by men who are chosen in a highly secretive and Byzantine selection process, the explanation of which takes up a full 52 pages in Reese’s book.

While there may be many Catholics interested in finding out what their archbishops do all day long, it is the reports of struggle between the bishops and Rome that keep the interest of the wider audience. Reese believes, however, that the U.S. bishops have arrived at an understanding with many in the Vatican on the course of events during the past few years.

He said American Catholics who like their bishops ought to write Rome to say so “because there are a lot of very right wing Catholics in the United States who send numerous letters to Rome with complaints and criticisms of the American bishops. That’s what leads the Vatican to believe there are serious problems in the American church when, in fact, there are not.”

Trip Changed Perception

The perception in Rome began to change, he said, with the papal trip to the United States that was followed by the “ad limina” visits (they are required every five years) of American bishops to Rome. In the ad limina visits, “the Pope’s talks to the bishops were much more positive than in earlier such visits. And at the meeting with the archbishops in Rome earlier this year, the relationship there, I think, was much more positive.”

The meeting with the archbishops was an unusual series of sessions that included open discussion with members of the curia in the presence of Pope John Paul II.

Reese pointed out that most of the archbishops were appointed by Pope John Paul. “It’s not as if he was meeting with a bunch of people who are at odds with him. Most of these people owed their jobs to him to begin with.”

The bishops benefited, on one hand, because Vatican officials, on listening to the Americans, “found them very reasonable people, not left-wing fanatics out to destroy the church. . . .”

On the other hand, said Father Reese, the bishops also got a chance to see the Vatican bureaucrats up close.

“There’s a number of things we have to keep clear when we talk about relationships between the Vatican and the American bishops. And the first thing is, each one of those groups is not a univocal bloc. All of the American bishops don’t think the same.

‘Not Univocal Bureaucracy’

“The same thing on the side of the Vatican. The Vatican is not this univocal bureaucracy that has one point of view that’s held by every member of it. . . . There are some very intelligent people in the Vatican, and there are some people in the Vatican who have very limited talent.

“I think it was very useful to the American bishops,” continued Reese, “to be sitting in Rome and be listening to the members of the Vatican bureaucracy because suddenly they became a bit demythologized. You suddenly began to see that cardinal so-and-so is not a real bright light, that he is a very limited person who can say very foolish things that get headlines across the United States.”

Consequently, said Reese, the American bishops came away from the meeting knowing that not everyone in the Vatican bureaucracy speaks for the Pope.

One result of the new perception, Reese wrote, was that “the Pope appears to be relying less” on Archbishop Justin Rigali, a Vatican official originally from Los Angeles who wrote many speeches for the Pope’s 1987 U.S. visit.

Reese, himself a Los Angeles native, said some U.S. bishops told him they believed that John Paul “had changed speech writers because he recognized that his U.S. speeches, especially his response to the American bishops (in a Los Angeles meeting), did not go over well.”

Rigali is nevertheless still prominent in Rome. Rigali, 54, remains president of the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, the Vatican’s diplomatic school, and in May of last year the Pope appointed him as a member of the Vatican Congregation of Bishops.

Ordained a priest in Los Angeles in 1961, Rigali most recently returned to the city last month for the funeral of Cardinal Timothy Manning.